Huwebes, Hulyo 2, 2015
Tips for Writing High Conversion Email Subject Lines
The Demise of Facebook’s Organic Reach
The Demise of Facebook’s Organic Reach written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Since its launch in 2007, Facebook’s Pages have promised businesses a free online presence with which to connect to customers, offering the opportunity to publish updates and promotional content directly into their news feeds. Yet for the past year, SMBs have seen the organic (ie. unpaid) reach of their posts diminish significantly.
The data supports this conclusion. In fact, Facebook has been slashing organic reach for years. Research conducted by Ogilvy & Mather shows that changes to Facebook’s algorithm have reduced the average exposure of unpaid posts from 12% in October of 2013 to around 6% in February 2015. In April 2015, eMarketer published data collected by Adobe showing an average organic reach of 4.3% for posts by retailers, which lead all other industries surveyed (tech, hospitality, and financial services all fell below 4%).
In a blog post from last November, Facebook acknowledged this trend and noted that it will continue.
This squeeze is part of Facebook’s overall monetization strategy and applies across the board. It doesn’t matter whether you are a major brand with millions of followers and millions more in ad budget or a small business that has depended for years on Facebook to reach a loyal customer base in the hundreds or thousands. Going forward, brands that want placement will have to pay for it.
Small Business
The precipitous decline in organic reach means that SMBs should reevaluate the place of social media in their overall marketing strategy, and consider other methods for managing customer relationships.
- Publish content through your own site and maximize reach by adding social tools. Your own website can still be a powerful tool for publishing branded content. The key to maximizing the reach of your self-published content is to add social tools to your site that allow for easy sharing through Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. Facebook’s move to cut organic reach also grants extra weight to content shared directly by friends. The value of a customer sharing your content will increase, and you want to give them as many opportunities as possible to do so.
- Email marketing still works. Businesses that turned away from email marketing in the advent of free social publishing services like Facebook and Twitter may want to rethink their strategy. Not only is email still an effective method for reaching customers, there is plenty of data to indicate that it was always more effective than social in the first place. In contrast to a facebook post, which gets delivered to a consumer’s feed around 2% of the time, emails are received 90% of the time and opened around 5%.
- Host FB-based videos on your own site. Facebook now allows you to embed videos from Facebook on your own site. This move by Facebook has industry observers clamoring about the social network’s renewed competition with YouTube. The truth is, this competition is great for SMBs. Videos shared on Facebook already have the pedigree of being vetted by an audience’s social network — sharing them on your own site can boost your content offering and deepen engagement.
Ken Swanson is CEO of AffinityX, the leading white label creative and marketing services provider for companies that serve small and medium businesses (SMBs).
3 ways to turn your brand into a social media juggernaut
This article is part of SWOT Team, a series on Mashable that features insights from leaders in marketing, brand-building and public relations.
We all know it pays to have a large social media presence (this is a world where companies pay Kim Kardashian an estimated $20,000 per promotional tweet). But short of buying followers or other forms of subterfuge, how can you organically build a powerful following and become a social media juggernaut?
For my new book Stand Out, I interviewed technology opinion leader Robert Scoble, who has built a massive social media following, including more than 450,000 Twitter followers, 650,000 Facebook followers and friends and a whopping 6.6 million followers on Google+ Read more...
More about Google, Robert Scoble, Social Media, Business, and Small BusinessSony files patent for weird selfie technology that reads your facial expressions
Now that the importance of selfies is well understood, Sony has filed a patent on mobile technology that takes selfies continually, and even picks out the good ones for us.
The patent outlines a way for a phone, camera or augmented reality device (like Google Glass) to take photos of the user continually throughout the day and night. The images are sent over a secure network to a server that processes them. The software then detects the emotional states displayed in each photo, and tags them as such.
Then it’s possible to search for all the happy moments throughout the day, for example, or all the sad ones. All the selfies that show a blank expression could be filtered out. The technology also offers ways of creating timelines of various emotional events — represented by images — throughout the day.
The system takes photos of the user during sleep, which might reveal some useful things about sleep quality and patterns. Or it might just be creepy.
There are some glaring privacy concerns with the technology. With so many selfies being shot and sent over a network, the target for would-be image thieves gets much bigger.
Research courtesy of SmartUp Legal.
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Easily Lose Tons Of Money With This AdWords Geo-Targeting Setting
AdWords has a variety of geo-targeting capabilities - you can geo-target by city, postal code, and even a radius around your desired location. What you may not have paid much attention to are the 'Location options (advanced)' settings. By default, your campaigns are set to target 'People in, or who show interest in my targeted […]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
Easily Lose Tons Of Money With This AdWords Geo-Targeting Setting
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Written by Lindsey Knapton,
The post Easily Lose Tons Of Money With This AdWords Geo-Targeting Setting appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
Tips for Writing High Conversion Email Content
How to Use Infographics Effectively
How to Use Infographics Effectively written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Click to view larger via Mammoth Infographics
Because of the constant bombardment of information we experience on a daily basis, the average human being now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish! In the digital era, marketers have to change and adapt their strategies in order to get their messages heard amongst the many other competing voices. Because humans are wired to respond more positively to visuals than text, infographics tend to get far more shares than traditional text-based content.
Additionally, infographics allow you to create an emotive story around a seemingly meaningless sea of data, allowing people to swiftly understand the key points without having to do any of the tedious reading. While anyone can pay to commission an infographic, there are certain factors you need to consider if you want your infographic to become a viral success!
Choosing the right topic
It’s important to remember that your infographic should never be a tout for your company; instead you should aim to tackle a contentious issue in your industry or cover a hot topic that you know will encourage sharing. In other words, aim to provide genuine value to people instead of simply promoting yourself. With resources such as Google Trends, Twitter hashtags, and numerous RSS aggregators, you’re sure to be able to find a topic that people will love to see encapsulated in a stunning infographic.
Content creation
When researching the facts for your infographic, always use reputable sources and ensure that they are airtight – particularly if your infographic is about a contentious issue – someone is bound to want to point out the flaws in your argument! You may wish to incorporate some quotes from industry specialists to serve as proof elements for your argument. Also, a few interesting lesser-known facts and quirky anecdotes may help to provide some light entertainment for readers.
When organizing your content, thinking visually is crucial. It’s important to remember that not every fact and statistic will make a good visualization, and conversely, not every great visualization will fit within the narrative of your infographic. In order for the infographic to work, the visuals must support the content and help to drive the narrative home. Never be tempted to sacrifice substance for style! As with any form of content marketing, well-researched, high-quality content is the cornerstone of an effective infographic.
Design
You may wish to design an infographic to match the branding of your company, and this may be a good idea if you are creating the piece for company presentations or other internal purposes. However, you should always avoid “over branding” the piece – in most cases you only need to include your company’s logo and website discretely in the footer.
In the design phase, less is more; if you’re used to creating long-winded text content, you may feel reluctant to omit certain pieces of data, even if they aren’t propelling the narrative forward. However, leaving in extraneous elements will only serve to clutter the infographic and confuse people. Always design from a holistic perspective and be prepared to sacrifice elements that aren’t contributing to the clarity and argument of the infographic.
Promotion
You may wish to create a specific landing page for your infographic, or you can simply post it as part of a blog post. Either way, you should make sure that the page has complete social media functionality so that people can share with ease. Additionally, it helps to include the HTML embed code directly beneath the infographic so people can post it on their websites with ease – this is particularly useful for bloggers within your niche who may wish to incorporate your infographic into their own unique content.
There are numerous infographic submission sites that will be happy to host your infographic and if you’re lucky you could even have it featured on Mashable. However, to get your infographic to go viral you’re probably going to have to do a lot of hustling. Promoting using social media is highly recommended, but don’t forget to leverage your personal network. If you know someone who has a large following online, persuading them to share your infographic can result in huge amounts of exposure, expanding your audience and bringing you new business!
Jack Knopfler is the Lead Content Editor at Mammoth Infographics. He has a background in digital marketing and has helped clients in a range industries to improve their presence online.